


Moonstruck

by Bhelryss



Series: eirichelweek2017 [3]
Category: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: AU: werewolves, F/F, Prompt: Moon, small parts for other characters: Tana/Seth/Ephraim/Moulder/Vanessa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 09:55:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12274035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bhelryss/pseuds/Bhelryss
Summary: Eirika suffers a misfortune, on her flight to Frelia with Seth. Afflicted by the moon’s whims, she finds comfort in L’Arachel, who holds those blessed with Latona’s own fangs as divine!





	Moonstruck

Seth has her before him on the horse, riding at speed away from the wild-eyed man on the dragon. She looks back, over his shoulder and past the horsetail streaming like a flag in a gale, to the wingspan dark against the sky and small with the distance. Not pursuing, just visible. And then, after a time, not even visible, lost to the trees. Bleeding and frightened, Seth drove the horse onwards, towards Frelia, and Eirika kept her eyes behind them, watching as her home grew further and further away.

Their retreat went mostly unhindered, the sun setting on what had been a rushed and fearful flight, giving way to a strained, but ultimately easy night. The moon was waning, only a fraction less than a luminous full face. With her knees brought up to her chest, and her arms holding them there, Eirika almost thought the night beautiful. It wasn’t though. The contents of this day were enough to stain any number of future nights dreadful and heartbreaking.

Exhausted emotionally, Eirika falls into a fitful sleep as Seth shifts in his watch, too wary of Grado forces behind them to risk a fire. She wakes to Seth’s hand on her shoulder, shaking her gently. 

“Something is out there,” Seth says lowly, hand on his weapon but still crouched, “we need to move.” There’s urgency in his voice, and his horse snorts nervously. She nods, and shakes off the last of the drowsiness. 

She mounts first, hands bracing against the horse’s neck as Seth mounted next, and then nudges the horse into a trot. They leave their makeshift camp behind easily, no firepit to put out and no supplies to repack...They ride into the night, away from whatever it was that had unnerved Seth and his horse. 

They pause for a moment when the trees grow thick again, making it difficult to ride at any sort of speed. While Seth checks over his mount, the pace of their flight from the castle, and then the limited rest no doubt poor for the horse’s health, Eirika keeps her seat and looks about them. With the light of the moon, she sees the eyes in the dark of a shadow, a flash of blue and a flash of yellow. Two sets, and then one steps further into the moonlight, revealing a large wolf. For a moment she thinks it is standing on it’s hind legs, before she realizes it had pounced into the light. 

It feels like she is staring it down for a long moment, and then the monster howls. Echoing howls from other wolves, and Seth practically leaps back into the saddle. “Hie!!” He yells, spurring his horse into action. By the time they’ve made it a furlong the massive creatures are flanking them, intelligent eyes glittering above lips curled up, snarls and what she can only name as barks filling the air. 

Even so, she is completely unprepared for the unearthly cry the horse lets out, before kicking out with its back legs. A wolf goes crying into the night, falling behind due to the hoof that had caught it squarely in the shoulder, while its teeth were sunk into the flesh below the horse’s knee. Another leaps, momentum pushing it far enough forward that Eirika can see the teeth clearly, and as more than just flashes of white in the gloom of the well lit night.

Seth kicks that one away, accidentally choking the reins and hindering the horse’s inclination to bolt even while he struggles to free his sword from scabbard, lance too far out of reach to be of use, with his free hand. The horse’s hesitation, as the bit pulls his head backwards, is enough for one of the wolves to lurch upwards, allowing teeth to close around the heavy, thick leather of Seth’s booted foot, and then drag the knight off his horse before he can arm himself. 

(Seth howls as his arm, tangled in the reins, wrenches upwards as he falls, dragged to the ground by teeth that have yet to puncture his boots, the upper jaw of the wolf grating against his greave and the bottom jaw trying to pierce through the heel of his boot. The wound in his side, courtesy of Valter, screams in protest against the movement.) Eirika fumbles with her rapier as she dismounts, fingers numb with the nervousness of her first true brush with combat. The confrontation with Valter hardly counted for her at all, and she stood with her feet in stance and her rapier level. Determination and grit would have to see her through, because confidence and experience had yet to become hers. 

She stabs one quickly, tip of her sword piercing the neck and shoulder of a beast that could tower over her if it reared up on its hind legs. It snaps at her, and she retreats a step and slashes the tip across the creature’s nose. Yelping, it turns and disappears into the night, and another wolf takes its place. 

Behind her, the horse rears up and comes down on a wolf trying to take a chunk out of Seth’s tangled arm like a sack of bricks dropped off a tower. Unharmed, Seth manages to find his feet and free his arm and sword. However, for all the good that does him, his sword arm is just barely not useless, thanks to Valter’s parting gift. Eirika, for her part, nearly gets in the way of a brutal back leg kick from Seth’s mount, and ducks underneath a well timed snarling jump of the wolf in front of her. 

It’s dizzying, the crush of wolves and horse and knight and princess, so much going on at once and the rush of the danger in her blood keeps her standing, on her feet and reacting. If Eirika even had time to think, between keeping away from the horse’s hooves as it lashes out at anything shaped differently from the man holding the sword, and the teeth and nails of the wolves, she might think that this is going fairly well, for such a terrible turn of events. She hasn’t been clipped by a hoof, and aside from scratches and wolf blood on her arms and skirt, she isn’t even injured.

Until she is.

One wolf jumps high, the other stays low, and Eirika jumps back to avoid the wolf aiming for her knees only to be slammed into by the wolf who’d aimed for her head. There’s a heavy paw pressing down on her chest, her rapier has been knocked from her hand, and there are teeth so very close to her face. She can feel the wolf’s breath on her face and feel saliva dripping from its teeth and lips onto her chin and cheek.

Her heart is beating like mad, as though it could propel her from this moment through sheer force. Time seems to slow, as she stares with freezing horror at the teeth as they descend, faster than she can truly follow. For a millisecond she almost thinks it hasn’t bit her, and then the pain sets in, feeling as though the bite itself were burning her upper arm and radiating blistering heat up her neck. She screams, and bucks wildly. Her good arm gripping the paw on her chest and her booted feet kicking at the monster’s back legs. Trying to throw it off, dislodge the creature, anything to get those teeth out of her. 

Desperate, she even tries to contort herself to bite at the wolf, as though that might discourage it where her scratching and kicking hadn’t. It shakes her, once, twice, and with her head spinning and the fire  _ burning _ in her shoulder, she subsides in her frenzied desperation. And then Seth is there, sword in his other hand, clumsy as he never is, but a welcome sight. Steel flashes in the moonlight, the wolf loosens its bite, howls fury and pain to the sky, and tries to limp swiftly away. 

Seth follows though, large strides and a calmness to his face that melts away to a grimace as he swings his sword without grace, as he thrusts his sword without finesse, until the wolf is dead, Eirika’s blood still on its lips. After that, the woods are quiet. Eerily silent, except for Seth’s labored breathing and Eirika’s good arm scratching at the dirt for purchase enough to sit up.

They don’t stop to bandage themselves up, or catch their breath. They only killed one wolf for certain, and where the rest were, neither of them could know. Seth helps Eirika up on the horse, spends a precious second eyeing the surroundings, and then mounts as well. Reins in his good hand, they push Seth’s mount as hard as they can, racing for the Frelian border and safety.

Tana exclaims and fusses over Eirika, once they’re all safe. She’s stopped bleeding, but her shirt sticks to her shoulder where the blood has dried, and it hurts to move at any pace beyond ‘treacherously slow’, and she is exhausted and shivery and while the fire in her blood has dimmed to a sharp discomfort, it is still very present and real. It is an incredible boon that King Hayden insists she see a healer, eat, and rest before he sees her, even if she almost insists otherwise.

But news of Ephraim can wait long enough for Tana to escort her to Father Moulder, long enough for her to scrub dried blood off her skin and wriggle into something of Tana’s that is clean. (All her clothes are back home...and she won’t think of that, because home is nothing anymore, without her father, without her father’s knights. Home is filled brimful with Grado’s soldiers, and therefore no longer her home.)

Eirika holds Tana’s hand, as Moulder examines her shoulder. He hums, and her eyes watch the ends of his mustache twitch as he shapes words with his lips but stays silent. There’s a lull in between the initial check where he stares at the ugly wound, and when he raises his staff with intent to heal. Her body seems to resist it, but eventually the skin does knit back together in a new, shiny, raised, and vicious looking purple scar. The bruises Father Moulder leaves intact, and he pats her kindly on the knee and lets Tana bully Eirika out of the room and into eating something. 

And then she sees King Hayden, and almost before she knows it she’s back on wooded paths and roads south, to her brother. Her bruises fade, Seth’s wound heals, her scar stays that unnerving, bruised color, but the rest of her heals up just fine, as the passage of time dictates. 

Her band of borrowed knights and Renais survivors grows, Grado grows ever closer, the moon wanes in the sky and begins to grow again as monsters filter through the forests. As Eirika rests her eyes for a moment, one night on watch, she rather thinks it is like she is living in a story.

She thinks very little of the trio of characters that approach just after she adds Artur and Lute to her troops. Very little indeed, too busy worrying and planning and seeking out Ephraim to spare the vivacious mounted healer more than a few thoughts. Her life is hectic and busy and fraught with danger on all sides, after all. More so than she could have imagined, she learns, when she hears of Orson’s betrayal.

All of the Renais knights are struck by that news. She can see it on Franz’s face especially, because Seth has learned to hide the worst of his emotions now. Ephraim survives though, and that is what she was worried about, so she does breathe easier despite it all. Having Ephraim back, whole and hale, soothes so many of her fears. 

They part though, as they decide they must, and it is not even a week past that that the moon is full, and her blood feels as though it is fire. Burning up from the inside, Eirika stumbles into a clump of trees off to the side of their camp, thinking she will be violently sick. That is not her fate, she realizes, when she catches sight of the tips of her fingers. They’ve turned to claws, and a sudden ache has her hunch over.

Within moments, the transformation is complete, and Eirika howls, because her blood is still fire, her body still aches. Movement helps, and so she runs, the night clear as day to her eyes, now. By complete chance, she happens upon a lone mogall. In a flash, it is dead, a growl reverberating in her throat as she shakes it for good measure. 

Morning comes and she stumbles back to camp, dazed and barefoot. Seth hovers, obviously worried by the bags under her eyes and the lack of focus to her gaze, but he says little. (She crashes that night, straight into her bedroll as soon as they call a halt, and doesn’t wake until Vanessa calls for her, the sun streaming into her tent through the open flap.) She keeps her words to herself, and tries not to think about how for approximately eight hours she was a wolf.

It happens again a month later, and the crash is just as drastic as the first time. Her scar is still purple, but the bruises are long gone. It is with grim humor that she thinks they were replaced by the dark circles (nearly bruises, as black as they are) under her eyes for the week and a half after the full moon. It is with dawning fear that she realizes the next full moon should occur well within the dunes of Jehanna. There are no woods for her to hide within, while the transformation takes her. 

She risks a look at her people, the ones who’ve followed her through Carcino and will follow her as she moves through Caer Pelyn and then sweeps down into Jehanna. She wonders who among them will find the wolf too frightening. She wonders how Ephraim will react to the wolf. The wolf that delights in shredding the dark things that have begun to find comfort in the shadows between trees. The things that grow bolder and sometimes forge into settled valleys and even ports. 

Perhaps she should worry less, but she can’t quite help it. She’s never even...there are stories of this sort of thing, much like there were stories of the revenants, but...well, she’d never expected it to be real. She’d never expected to live it. (Eirika seems to be living in one of the stories about the heroes who felled the demon king. She wonders what exactly that means, for her future.)

L’Arachel and her companion, Dozla, are breaths of fresh air. Eirika has no time at all to be stuck in her head when the healer is there, smiling so and saying such brazen things. “No army of fiends could triumph against the Divine Light of Saint Latona!” she’d say, whenever Seth or Innes or another might try to convince her not to lead the charges, unarmed as she was except for her heavy mend stave.

She brought a brightness to the campaign that Eirika hadn’t realized had gone. Over the course of her marches, from Frelia to Grado to Carcino to here, she’d developed a bit of a brooding habit. Between the wolf and her worries for Ephraim, and the grief of her Father’s loss, and any other number of small things that demanded her attention, she’d nearly lost her smile. L’Arachel brought it back, and Eirika couldn’t keep her eyes off of her, so great was her gratitude, so great was the contentment that L’Arachel inspired in Eirika. 

Eirika makes a point to spend her evenings, at the very least, in the healer’s company. (“Fair Eirika!” is a frequent greeting, accompanied by a smile so catching that Eirika is smiling back before she even realizes.) Dinners, part of each march for as long as her legs will keep pace with L’Arachel’s horse...as they close in on Jehanna, Eirika even makes a habit of pitching her tent close to L’Arachel’s. 

Hearing her loud greetings to the sun and the dawn each morning was a much more pleasant manner of waking than Seth calling from outside, or someone else coming in to call her name. (“A beautiful morning!” L’Arachel says each day, as though she has never known how to keep her voice down. “A beautiful day to share Latona’s Divine Light and Way with those who are blessed with my presence!!”) Each morning in L’Arachel’s company is a blessing, and Eirika is appropriately grateful, appropriately contented in every shared moment.

Eirika shifts one night, hopefully hidden from the camp by the rolling dunes as her blood turns to fire. As is her monthly routine, she howls to the moon, and patrols in circles of increasing size as the night grows old. There are no monsters to sate her drives, the sun reflects off the sand so hot that even the strongest gargoyle keeps away from the heart of the desert nation. She turns back after the sun has truly risen, shaking the claws from her fingertips and stumbling barefoot over shifting dunes.

Standing in the sunlight at the edge of camp is L’Arachel, feet planted firmly and her hand up by her eyes. She waves after a moment, having spotted Eirika, and jogs forth at a much more lively pace than the Renais heir, drained as she is. She practically falls into the healer’s arms, and L’Arachel merely shifts her hold and walks back to camp.

“I was thinking, sweet Eirika, that we might turn north for Rausten, after reuniting with your lord brother.” L’Arachel says, voice a bubbling river over large but smooth rocks, calming to listen to. Easy enough to let the words wash over her, her exhaustion makes things all too easy to blend together into meaningless noise, and L’Arachel’s voice is melodic.

“And in the north, there in my brilliant, beautiful homeland, there is an order you might learn from! Of Latona’s own hounds, we of Rausten have always been proud to house a mighty number. For do not the stories say they are divinely charged with fighting the darkness in the deep woods?”

A rhetorical question, but Eirika’s focus comes back. 

“And you have done marvelously of course, noble heart! But it is my fondest belief that your talent will blossom under the tutelage of the greatest of the Saint’s wolves!!” Her gaze is fond, Eirika notices, though her heart rate has picked up nervously. “Do not be afraid, for I know those of my people who share your gift would love you, just as I love you!” Said so firmly that for a moment Eirika doesn’t even notice, too busy being wide eyed that her secret is finally lost. 

Just as she loves her?

“Wait, L’Arachel-” Eirika protests, and they stop, just outside the camp that is rousing itself. Today is the day they make it to Jehanna Hall. “You know?” ( _ You love me? _ ) And there are more people whose blood turns to fire with each full-faced moon? And L’Arachel loves her? (Knowing there is no food in her stomach, Eirika reasons that perhaps the fluttery feeling in her stomach is just hunger.)

L’Arachel tips her face close to Eirika’s, whispering into her ear so that Gilliam, passing close by, won’t overhear. “To those who know, the eyes of one chosen are ever a clear sign. I knew from the moment I met you! Oh how bright your eyes shone!! I could see the fire of your heart, laid bare by Latona’s blessing!”

And louder, “Dear Eirika, you were beautiful beyond compare!! You are a dashing heroine of divine grace! Your gift gives you power over the darkness in the nights, blessed as you are by the Saint’s own light!” Cheeks bright with her passion, L’Arachel’s gaze pierces. Eirika’s belly warms at the praise, the clear fondness and regard that drips from each word. 

“I’d like to kiss you.” Eirika admits, and admires the way L’Arachel’s face pinks so prettily. After all that bald admiration and affection, the idea of a kiss is what makes her blush? It seems absurd, but in truth it is simply absurdly charming. She finds L’Arachel absurdly charming. 

“Now?” L’Arachel asks, as though Eirika has just asked her to do something scandalous.

“Well, no.” Eirika acknowledges sadly, because the idea seems so nice. Her lips must be so soft, after all. “We still need to march, after all, the heat is nearly on us!” And Eirika rather thought she had sand in places it shouldn’t be. Not mentioning the fact she’d like to sleep before kissing L’Arachel, so she could remember the whole thing outside the fuzzy haze of exhaustion. 

“But, later...absolutely, L’Arachel. I would like to kiss you.”

For a moment, L’Arachel is speechless. “I would like that,” she answers eventually, continuing with walking Eirika back to camp. “I would like that very much.”


End file.
